She Talks to Angels
by UA
Summary: She never mentions the word addiction.
1. Chapter 1

**Title: **_She Talks to Angels  
><em>**Rating: **PG, PG-13.  
><strong>Warning: <strong>allusions to drug abuse, prostitution  
><strong>PairingCharacters: J**essica, minor characters  
><strong>Word Count: <strong>740.  
><strong>Summary (for chapter): <strong>_She folds her arms across her chest in an effort to shield his eyes from the faint network of scars traveling along the blue shadows of her veins and fights the heaviness she feels tugging at her spine._

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><p><strong>~1~<strong>

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><p>The room is small, barely big enough to fit a table in—one of those fold-up kind, for playing cards—and a couple of chairs. Her chair wobbles under her weight, and she hooks her bare feet around its legs to steady it, presses her toes into the cold concrete floor. She rests one elbow on the table, dropping her chin onto the ledge of her palm. Stretching her other arm out, she taps her nails rhythmically against its scratched surface and waits.<p>

And waits.

Finally, Quinlan enters the room, and she looks up from her bored examination of the chips in her black nail polish, watches warily as he settles into the chair opposite her.

Marty Quinlan is older than she remembers, with more gray sprinkling the hair at his temples. Faint lines spider out from his kind eyes, laugh lines, but he doesn't smile at her, doesn't even speak for several long moments.

She straightens in her rickety chair, stares at him with big eyes, feels at once like the shy teen-aged girl that used to sneak smiles at him when she knew he wasn't looking, him and Luis, and feels the creeping sense of shame that clings to her bones these days, squirreled away in the very depths of her marrow, seep back to the surface of her skin, staining it in a faint blush. She folds her arms across her chest in an effort to shield his eyes from the faint network of scars traveling along the blue shadows of her veins and fights the heaviness she feels tugging at her spine. She opens her mouth to speak but realizes she doesn't know what to say, doesn't know how to explain the wreck her life has become, and drops a hand to pick self-consciously at the edges of her skirt, hiked high on her thighs.

Quinlan clears his throat, and the kindness in his eyes becomes tempered with something else. He speaks, and he is all business as he pulls a tablet from the inside of his jacket, reads the charges off of it like bullet points. "Possession, intoxication, soliciting…the list goes on."

Not only does it go on; it gets worse, she knows. Still, she stares unblinkingly at Quinlan, steels herself for whatever else he has to say to her. Her urge to fidget restlessly under his intense gaze manifests in her bouncing thigh, and she draws her shoulders up and sniffs, the action unconscious, knee-jerk. A little piece of her, a tiny smidgen of pride she didn't know she had left, recoils and starts to shrivel up at the pity she glimpses in his eyes, and it becomes too much, looking at him. She redirects her glassy gaze to a point over his broad shoulder and withdraws into herself, into that tiny box inside of her, her safe place, shuts the drone of his voice out, until something else he says jerks her back into the cold, hard present.

"You help us put Spike behind bars where he belongs, and a judge might look more favorably at you, give you a chance to take your life back. You won't get off scott-free, but it will be better than spending most of your adult life in the Pen upstate." Quinlan leans back, knows by the look on her face that she's seriously considering his proposal. The ice melts from his eyes, and the kindness is back as he drops his voice to a low, caring whisper. "It's as good a deal as you're going to get, so you think long and hard about it. Okay?"

A knock at the door startles them both, and she feels the words spilling forth without her permission, laden with a thin strain of desperation as she watches him stand, cross the room, and lay his hand upon the knob. "In here? What are you going to do? Keep me here until I say yes?"

A dark-haired man appears at the door, a member of the Castleton squad instrumental in the previous evening's bust, and talks to Quinlan in hushed tones.

Despite his quiet murmur, though, she picks out one name, a familiar one, and looks to Quinlan in question as his eyes fall back upon her.

"Not here," Quinlan finally tells her.

An avalanche of warring emotions engulfs her with his answer, and her skin starts to itch with anxiety.

"Jessica, Officer Lopez-Fitzgerald is here to take you home**." **

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><p><strong>So...apparently, I have some sort of sickness, lol, that involves constantly starting new stories. <strong>

**Sorry. It seems I can't listen to music without getting ideas. **

**Don't worry; I haven't forgotten about my other stories. I just have to get this one out of my system, because it seems to be all I can think about the last few days. **

**This is a break from my usual fare. I don't know quite how I feel about it yet. **

**Let me know what you think about it, okay? **

**Feedback is love. **

**Thanks so much for reading!**


	2. Chapter 2

**Title: **_She Talks to Angels  
><em>**Rating: **PG  
><strong>Warning: <strong>none for this chapter, really**  
><strong>**Pairing/Characters: **Jessica, Fancy, Sam/Ivy  
><strong>Word Count: <strong>664  
><strong>Summary (for chapter): <strong>"Harmony's not the same town you left behind."

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><p><strong>~2~<strong>

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><p>Officer Lopez-Fitzgerald turns out not to be Luis, but Fancy, and her blue eyes sneak glances at Jessica through the rear-view mirror of her Harmony PD squad car. The long gray ribbon of asphalt traveling from Castleton to Harmony stretches ahead of them for several miles before Fancy manages to push out two words to her, and Jessica hears the strange mixture of wariness and curiosity in the other woman's question.<p>

"You hungry?"

Jessica shakes her head in answer, but Fancy pulls into the drive-thru of the next fast food restaurant they encounter anyway, and the salt and the grease from the French fries they share between them make Jessica's eyes flutter shut in appreciation. When she opens them again, Fancy is watching her with undisguised interest and something too close to pity for Jessica's tastes. She pushes Fancy's hand away when she offers her more food and curls her legs and arms around herself defensively.

The miles pass in silence, except for the occasional crackling of static coming from the car's radio. Fancy lifts the mouthpiece to her lips once or twice, spouts off code words and numbers, police gibberish, that she belatedly realizes Jessica is vaguely familiar with before dropping the silly pretense, and her eyes gravitate back to the strange girl-woman wrapped in a tight knot in her backseat and daring her to say what's on her mind.

Jessica shakes her head, her dirty tangle of dark hair sliding across her shoulders as she reaches out a hand to toy with the dangling heel of her broken shoe on the seat beside her. She can still feel the pinch of the stilettos on her sore feet, and she wiggles her toes, stretches them, sighs, before lifting her head and meeting Fancy's blue eyes again. "I'm not some circus freak," she finally mutters, glares at Fancy indignantly, though she knows, with her black raccoon eyes, dark smudge of lipstick, and cheap clothes, she must look like something close.

Fancy's mouth falls open in protest, but she wisely says nothing, just returns her attention to the road in front of her, tightens her hands around the steering wheel.

There's no glint of a ring in the harsh sunlight, and Jessica wonders at the woman who would bear a man's name but not the symbol of his commitment. The glare makes her head ache, and she wishes again she hadn't lost her sunglasses, misses the shield of their protection, the mirage of their anonymity as they cross into the city limits of the town she grew up in and grow ever-closer to the family she had forsaken. She fumbles for her purse, remembers then, that like the rest of her possessions, it is locked up as evidence back in Castleton, and rubs her fingers together anxiously. She closes her eyes as the squad car turns down her street, eases past the Bed and Breakfast, and her childhood home looms into view.

Fancy warns, not unkindly, as she pulls into the driveway behind a car Jessica does not recognize, "Things have changed since you've been gone." She turns the car off and shifts in her seat to face Jessica full on. "Harmony's not the same town you left behind."

Jessica doesn't trust her voice to speak so she nods, lifts her hand to the door, waits for Fancy to unlock it. She squints against the sunlight when she spills out into it, shields her eyes with her hand, frozen until the front door opens and a familiar figure emerges, then another one, and she realizes, this is what Fancy was trying to prepare her for.

Ivy breaks away from her father, offers her a tentative smile.

Jessica's fingers clench, white-knuckled, around the shoes in her hand, and her eyes dart back and forth between Fancy, Ivy, and her father, and she backs away involuntarily, disbelief in her eyes as the catches sight of the ring sparkling on Ivy's finger.

It seems congratulations are in order.

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><p><strong>Feedback is love!<strong>

**Thanks so much for reading!**


	3. Chapter 3

**Title: **_She Talks to Angels  
><em>**Rating: **PG, although the subject matter could warrant a PG-13  
><strong>Warning: <strong>allusions to drug abuse**  
><strong>**Pairing/Characters: ** Jessica, mentions of Fancy, Ivy, Sam  
><strong>Word Count: <strong>384.  
><strong>Summary (for chapter): <strong>_She locks herself in the bathroom, turns on the water to drown out their voices, studies herself in the mirror._

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><p><strong>~3~<strong>

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><p>Jessica shrugs Fancy's instructions off, rolls her eyes as the woman shares an exasperated look with her mother, and wanders up the stairs, away from the prying eyes watching her, judging her. She knows what house arrest is; she hardly thinks her police chief father is going to let her forget. She locks herself in the bathroom, turns on the water to drown out their voices, studies herself in the mirror.<p>

Dark circles, bruises really, ring the skin beneath her bloodshot eyes. Coupled with the heavy black eye liner she wears, and the smoky shadow of her lids, her blue eyes peer back at her, looking as overwhelmed as she feels in this moment. She drops wearily to the toilet seat, tugs at the skirt that rests several inches above her knees, glances at her toes. Her lips curl in distaste at their dirty appearance and focus back on her arms, the scars her father hadn't been able to tear his blue eyes away from. It was his laser-like intensity that had compelled her to flee, seek shelter elsewhere, and looking around, she feels unsettled at the changes time and a new bride have wrought.

Distantly, she hears a door close, a car start up, and Jessica knows without looking that Fancy has gone, left her here in this place. She feels both disquieted and relieved at the knowledge and stands up, inspecting all the nooks and crannies, lifting up a crystal container of flowery hand soap and putting it back down after an experimental sniff. She opens the medicine cabinet, finds it empty, and pushes it shut again, anger tightening her chest. She jerks open drawers, finds them empty of everything save linen, slams them closed. She feels that same itch of apprehension crawling along her nerve pathways and stifles the urge to scream. She settles for digging her fingernails painfully deep into her palms, throwing her head back against the wall, and slithering down it into an undignified heap, the water still running in the background.

She slips into an uneasy sleep.

When Jessica wakes, the sun is no longer shining, and the water has been turned off. She stares at the neat stack of clothing resting beside her rumpled head and feels her throat close up with tears.

She is home.

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><p><strong>Thanks so much anonymous reviewer!<strong>

**LOL!**

**No, really. **

**As short and sweet as it was, I can't tell you how much I appreciated getting the alert that someone had reviewed this story. ; )**

**Short chapter, this one. Too short, really, but these chapters are writing themselves, and since this story has hijacked my thought processes, I'm just going with the flow. **

**Feedback really is love. **

**Thanks so much for reading!**


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